In line with the book’s focus on turning data into knowledge through powerful, insightful measurement and analytics of social media efforts, we wanted to share three simple tips and resources that nonprofits can put to work.

After you’ve used Twitter for a time, you’ll want to measure your influence on Twitter as well as you’re performing from month to month. Unless you want to hire someone to spend the day counting and analyzing your retweets, take a look at the free tools below (some may have paid premium versions) and put them to use on behalf of your nonprofit, social enterprise, business — or your own brand.

Klout: Measure influence and style

Klout is a visual, logical way to quickly see the main thing most organizations want to know about Twitter: where you stand against the competition. The application’s initial strength is the ease with which you can compare yourself to your peers. After using Klout for about a month, however, the information becomes more advanced, if not just downright complimentary. My “Klout Style” page, for example, offers sleek flattery such as: “You don’t just share news, you create the news” and “When you speak, people listen.” Thanks, Klout! How’s my tie look?

Rating: ★ ★ ★

PeerIndex: Assess your online social capital

Where Klout was accessible and easy to decipher, I found PeerIndex a bit baffling. PeerIndex separates itself by measuring how your tweets “resonate” with others. They include ranking on several important-sounding topics, such as “authority,” “activity” and “realness.” Klout said I was influential, but PeerIndex seems to think my influence is limited. After reading through the Scores and Ranking page in the hopes of defining these terms, I came away still mystified about how the topics work and what they mean. On the plus side, if you use this tool at work, you can probably sound impressive in an office meeting by reporting to your boss that the Twitter project is highly authoritative. It might be a strong tool, but when all is said and done, I didn’t dig too deep into the site. However, it has a nice comparison graph that allows you to add and remove other Twitter users.

Rating: ★ ★

Twitalyzer: A subscription-model tool

Twitalyzer operates mainly on a subscription model, but gives away some basic features for free. I’m not in a position to pay $99/month to track my competition or get daily email alerts, so I can’t speak about its full range of offerings. I do feel comfortable saying it may not worth $99/month to spy on Cogsley Cogs’ Twitter statistics and your time would be better spent working on your own page. With a free account, I was able to log in and immediately see my relative percentile (only as ranked among other Twitalyzer users, though) and a map that informed me that most of my views come from New Jersey. It also told me what my Klout and PeerIndex ratings were. This seems like a tool better suited to analyzing your competition than to analyzing yourself.

Rating: ★ ★

TweetStats: Graph your stats!

Tweetstats remains true to its name, as it compiles a bar graph for quick viewing of your monthly stats. Easily see who you @replied to, whom you retweet and what time of day you tweet the most. A useful, basic tool that will offer a helpful overview for any Twitter campaign your nonprofit or business undertakes.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

Crowdbooster: Schedule and analyze

Of all the applications I used, Crowdbooster was my personal favorite. In addition to analyzing your influence and impressions, they also set themselves apart with useful features like the ability to schedule a tweet at the time where it will reach the most amount of followers. They provide actionable recommendations on influential users, offering the option to follow them back from inside their application. I found their charts clear and precise, and their analysis was directly applicable to my Twitter page.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Tweet Grader: Score your profile

Part of a suite of free online marketing tools powered by HubSpot, Tweet Grader is a straightforward tool that measures the power of your Twitter profile. Type in your Twitter handle and Tweet Grader generates a score out of 100 for your overall Twitter profile. You can also use it to find out the scores of other Twitter users and then compare those to your own. In calculating your score, Tweet Grader’s algorithm takes into account the following factors: number and power of followers, follower-to-following ratio, update frequency and most recent, as well as engagement. The site is also handy for seeing top lists, generated by Twitter Grader based on its scoring system. Use it to locate the “Twitter elite,” i.e. Top Users, Top Brands and even Top Women on Twitter.

Last week public relations and measurement professionals met in Lisbon, Portugal, for a summit hosted by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications. Of interest was an workshop that was designed to begin setting the standards in social media measurement co-facilitated by KD Paine, an expert in communications and social media measurement.

The workshop shared a landscape analysis of what’s already out there from the various industries to build a clear understanding of what’s in place and what isn’t in terms of valid metrics around social media measurement.

The workshop built on the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles (PDF) that were identified at last year’s summit. These are more philosophical but represent good practice for a measurement approach to accompany your social media strategy.

Applying a valid measurement approach for nonprofits

I took a stab at translating them to a nonprofit context:

1Set SMART objectives and identify a measurement strategy at the start of your campaign or program. Social media measurement should take a holistic approach including both traditional and social media and look at changes in awareness among key audiences, attitude, action and behavior change that impacts business results.

2Measure the effect on outcomes, don’t measure outputs. Measure your results, not just numbers. A typical output measure might be the number of visitors to a website or participants in a program. What should be measured are shifts in awareness, comprehension, attitude and behavior related to donations, purchase, branding, reputation, public policy, employee engagement and other shifts in audience beliefs or behaviors related to SMART objectives. Continue reading →

I’ve long admired and respected Beth, and I’m a fan of Radian6, a social media monitoring service. The session covered a lot of ground for a fairly contained topic and I was impressed with the depth and breadth of the presentation. Beth and Lauren discussed both strategy and tools, tips and metrics, leaving little ground uncovered. The focus was around the return on investment: how to think of the value of social media, the things you need before starting any campaign, and how to measure, analyze and sell campaigns. Here’s a recap:

Part I: A guide for your social media adventure

Let’s say you want to get started using social media. Where? How? While this session wasn’t a primer, Beth’s four ‘I’s, plus the discussion on objectives and SMART analysis, are a fantastic starting point.

The philosophy and definition of ROI

Beth’s four ‘I’ terms are a contextual lens through which to look at social media ROI. She said she takes a broader definition of ROI, to include:

Return on Insight: this is about harvesting intelligence about what works and what doesn’t, to apply to the future. Listening, learning and adapting – sometimes called an iterative process – means that you take a longer-term view of the project, that sometimes a culture change within your organization is necessary to make room for reflection, and that you’ll find success and know what it is when you find it. If you find that tweeting about the hard-hitting emotional stuff seems to get the biggest reaction every time, apply this to remaining communications for this medium even if it means going back and changing agreed-upon communication pieces. Beyond that, remember it for future campaigns.

Return on Interaction: it’s about engagement and relationship building with your audience. The goal is to set people on the ladder of engagement to become donors/members/lovers of your cause. But before you get there, how are they engaging with you? What are they saying? How do they treat your brand? This has to be monitored in order to be evaluated.

Return on Investment: investment is about value, and measuring the relationship between what you’ve done and what it costs. Some tangible indicators are: fundraised dollars, new activists or email list growth, new volunteers,

Return on Impact: this is about our big goal – to effect social change. Sometimes impact is different or more than just about investment. If you can use Twitter to stop a company from doing something, or vote for something, while that may be hard to quantify, there is a return on impact.

These four ‘I’s are valuable as a starting point for any organization looking to dive into social media in a concerted way. I’d recommend a discussion around these four ‘I’s by any team about to start a social media campaign, because it’ll help you to be thoughtful and reflective, and therefore more strategic, as you get started and get comfortable with social media metrics and measurement. I think Beth’s underlying point here is: Do this thoughtfully and with goals and guidelines. Continue reading →